Famous Americans of Recent Times eBook

Never was mental assurance more complete, and seldom
less warranted by innate or acquired superiority.
If his knowledge of books was slight, his opportunities
of observing men were still more limited, since he
passed his whole life in places as exceptional, perhaps,
as any in the world,—­Washington and South
Carolina. From the beginning of his public career
there was a canker in the heart of it; for, while
his oath, as a member of Congress, to support the
Constitution of the United States, was still fresh
upon his lips, he declared that his attachment to
the Union was conditional and subordinate. He
said that the alliance between the Southern planters
and Northern Democrats was a false and calculated compact,
to be broken when the planters could no longer rule
by it. While he resided in Washington, and acted
with the Republican party in the flush of its double
triumph, he appeared a respectable character, and
won golden opinions from eminent men in both parties.
But when he was again subjected to the narrowing and
perverting influence of a residence in South Carolina,
he shrunk at once to his original proportions, and
became thenceforth, not the servant of his country,
but the special pleader of a class and the representative
of a section. And yet, with that strange judicial
blindness which has ever been the doom of the defenders
of wrong, he still hoped to attain the Presidency.
There is scarcely any example of infatuation more
remarkable than this. Here we have, lying before
us at this moment, undeniable proofs, in the form
of “campaign lives” and “campaign
documents,” that, as late as 1844. there was
money spent and labor done for the purpose of placing
him in nomination for the highest office.

Calhoun failed in all the leading objects of his public
life, except one; but in that one his success will
be memorable forever. He has left it on record
(see Ben on, II. 698) that his great aim, from 1835
to 1847, was to force the slavery issue on the North.
“It is our duty,” he wrote in 1847, “to
force the issue on the North.” “Had
the South,” he continued, “or even my
own State, backed me, I would have forced the issue
on the North in 1835”; and he welcomed the Wilmot
Proviso in 1847, because, as he privately wrote, it
would be the means of “enabling us to force
the issue on the North.” In this design,
at length, when he had been ten years in the grave,
he succeeded. Had there been no Calhoun, it is
possible—­nay, it is not improbable—­that
that issue might have been deferred till the North
had so outstripped the South in accumulating all the
elements of power, that the fire-eaters themselves
would have shrunk from submitting the question to
the arbitrament of the sword. It was Calhoun who
forced the issue upon the United States, and compelled
us to choose between annihilation and war.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Calhoun had still Irish enough
in his composition to use “will” for “shall.”]